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Month: March 2014

There are SO many fun things happening on this page. I can hardly stand it! I tagged my pics with the day count on my running streak. day 772 was the biggest snow we had this year and I wanted to get my run in before the sleet started. I saw two things I’ve never seen before during that run, a set of four women carrying a table umbrella to protect them from the falling snow and people pushing cars up the hill towards campus to get to the top. The meme pictured next to that pic was my favorite of a series created from a picture of the HWY nearby the same day.

day 780 was a typical Thursday homework run followed by a quick bite plus margaritas since Gloria had to miss so many of the post-run Monday dinners. day 776 was a Laurel Hill preview run for the not so faint at heart RunBuds who are planning to do the Tar Heel 10 miler in April. day 775 was an ever popular Point to Pint run where we picked a point on the ATT and ran to Tyler’s for pints! I started 13.5ish miles from Tyler’s and picked up many RunBuds along the way. The trail was covered with snow and sometimes ice and luckily also had four-wheeler tracks we could run in. The Nike Watch threw me a party when my mileage on that run hit 14.02.

day 779 and 786 were runs with my oldest. He and I did run:walk intervals and took breaks on benches and even had jelly bean breaks. day 782 was a nice fast long run which I hadn’t been doing a lot of throughout the month and the picture above was a birthday dinner to celebrate the fast and fabulous Ellen Moss.

I am running the year and am on track to hit my goal. I only have to run a little over 150 miles in March to meet my 1/4 year goal.

I seriously LOVE my RunBuds — this page is full of awesome post-RunBuds dinners and post-homework jump shots. I love the quote on the meme — “On my journey as a runner I found myself. Along the way I found a community of people that support each other. It’s so much more than just running. It’s love, encouragement and unity over a sport that welcomes all.” This to me truly sums up the Bull City Running Company RunBuds community to a T. And my buds totally rock my running socks.

Running in a relay is one of the most fun race day experiences I have had to date. There were eight of us representing the RunBuds at the Massacre Marathon Relay in Greensboro in the beginning of February. We had two teams: the A Team, and the Bodacious Buds.
In addition to the RunBuds, Bull City Running Co. sent four members of the track team who came in first place among all the women’s teams. They were a sight to behold! Since they were running almost twice as fast as we were, we always had someone to watch coming through the relay point. It was a 16 leg relay, each leg was 1.6mi with the exception of the very first leg which was 2.2mi. I loved seeing the creative team names and costumes, and getting to see one guy qualify for Boston by running the entire relay by himself and another guy finish his second marathon of the day because he had run a marathon on the treadmill before coming to the race.

My fabulously fun photo shoot with Big Star Studios. Garry and Emily take all of my family photos and I was inspired to have my photos taken doing something I LOVE, running! We met for an afternoon shoot at the Occoneechee Speedway and Garry and Emily took pictures of me for a little over an hour. I ended up running a little over a half mile during the shoot, and I LOVE how the photos turned out. For the shoot I wore my Bull City Running Co. Craft Jacket, a tank top, Lululemon crops, an Athleta CYA (cover-your-assets) skirt, and the shoes that I was awarded from BCRC and Saucony for the first year of my running streak. I love that we were able to capture this special part of my life.

Page three brings us to the end of January. I finished up the month with 183.02 miles and 27,388 calories. My running goal this year is to run the year 2014 in miles. With the mileage I did in January, I am 9.09% of the way there.

I included a photo from Jen Dixon of the Do Not Enter sign on the bridge across 40. The running community is thrilled they finally finished the pedestrian bridge connecting the north and south side of the American Tobacco Trail. I crossed it for the first time on January 26th and will be crossing it a bunch more over the next several months.

The 5th annual Tobacco Trail Trot was held at the end of January. I had a GREAT time running with Kellye in the beginning — she did the four mile option and connected up with Rosemary for the last 4.2 miles. She kicked it in at the end in a sneak attack. Pancakes were of course the highlight of the run back at Bull City Running Company.

At the bottom of the page I feature the run I did for Meg Menzies. Runners in the area ran their miles in honor of her life. I managed to get in a little over 8 miles of running. I did a homework run with the RunBuds and then popped over to Bull City Running Company to meet up with some of the Usual Running Suspects for a surprise visit from Tiffany Pierskalla. We ran and then went to lunch at Zin Burger at the mall.

RunBuds kicked off in January. It is a 10 week long running program for women that is offered at Bull City Running Company in Durham. I did my first round of RunBuds in 2011 about six months after I started running.
Last year and this year I had the absolute pleasure of acting as a RunBuds leader for the AWESOME Bee Balms. The Bee Balms are one of five pace groups within RunBuds. We start the 10 week series at a 2:1 interval and finish up at a 6:1 interval. It is totally awesome to run with these women and to watch them transform from non-runners or to rediscover their love of running. Many of last year’s Bee Balms completed their first half marathon in the fall and several are doing the Merge 25k in just a couple of weeks.
During RunBuds this year, my co-leader and I invited anyone interested to go out to dinner post-run. On Thursdays I hosted a homework run and the fast and fabulous Ellen Moss worked with us on learning to perfect the post-run jump pic. We also did homework runs on Saturday mornings.

To kick off my 2014 pages, I digiscrapped the first run of the year. A BUNCH of RunBuds took part in an awesome little New Year’s Run called Resolve to Run put on by RunRaleighRaces. There were several routes to choose from. I did the four mile route and ended up keeping pace with Donna (she’s pretty speedy) and we kept it under 11 minutes per mile. The course was a tad short so we ran past Tir Na Nog to get to 4.0 miles. Afterwards we filled a few tables and enjoyed post run fuel and celebrations. It was a great way to start the year.

This also marked the end of my “Stay Active Through the Holidays Challenge” where I had almost 50 women attempting to be active every day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. They had to do some form of cardio, strength training, stretching, or yoga every day and post about it on our facebook page. I gave prizes away throughout the event each week. It was fabulous to read about everyone’s activity and great motivation to keep us moving when it is really challenging to keep active.

In the bottom right corner I took all the words of thanks people posted at the end of the challenge and put them into tagxedo to create the heart shaped word art. It makes me smile just looking at it.